Inside the 'garden of evil'

October 5, 2002 — 10.00am

In the extravagant halls of King Saud University, 25-year-old Abdullah Al Gathani put a few more bricks in a wall of anger and denial. "I don't believe the hijackers were Saudis," he exclaimed. It's not an isolated view. In the year since three-quarters of the September 11 hijackers were revealed to have come from the kingdom, Saudi Arabia has been rocked by confusion and uncertainty. But now resentment is the dominant emotion, and even when they express horror, many Saudis quickly segue to a variation of: "Well, the Americans deserved it, didn't they?"

Abdullah Al Gathani, a student of computer science, managed to get much of the Saudi arguments into one bitter spray, in which he regurgitated conspiracy theories that are becoming accepted as fact by many in this region: "I'm being punished because of Osama bin Laden - the US will not grant me a student visa. What happened on September 11 was too big for 19 people to do - I think the Americans did it themselves; that's why the Jews on Wall Street didn't go to work that day."

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In Jeddah, the corporate headquarters for the wealthy bin Laden family, the Herald was informed that it is not "polite" to inquire of family members about the wellbeing or whereabouts of their brother, the mass murderer. And across the country businessmen defended their Islamic charity-giving, which the United States says has been corrupted to fund al-Qaeda and other terrorist operations around the world.

It all screams for a thorough investigation.

But there will be no committee of inquiry into the rips in the social fabric that shaped 15 of Saudi Arabia's young men as terrorists and which make Abdullah Al Gathani and many of his campus colleagues respond to the attacks as they do. And there will be no royal commission into the making of Osama bin Laden and the thousands who fell in behind him for jihad in Afghanistan.

Instead, Saudis seek refuge in a parallel universe, a place where answers to questions about what is rotten in Saudi Arabia dwell on the faults of the US and Israel; a place where inquiries about the shortcomings of its schools and universities provoke mockery of the American education system; a place where criticism of the security authorities meets mirth over US intelligence failures; a place where the democratic void is championed as protection for the rights of individuals.

As the House of Saud is pulled this way and that between its military alliance with the US and its religious partnership with the keepers of Saudi Arabia's strict Wahabi Islamic creed, economists are rating it as a brittle Third World economy - despite its massive oil wealth.

Oil is its only significant earner, but that employs only 1.5 per cent of the people. Defence gobbles up 40 per cent of the budget. There were water restrictions this year and brownouts are forecast for next year because not enough is being spent on national infrastructure. And with 47 per cent of the population under 15, Saudi Arabia is a demographic time bomb.

Per capita oil income is only a tenth of what it was 20 years ago and the Government is attempting to grapple with the consequence of the longstanding Saudi distaste of service jobs - more than 5 million guest workers have been imported to keep the country going, but more than 3 million Saudis stew in unemployment.

Corruption by the royals over the years has been valued by a family member at as much as $US50 billion ($92 billion) and before September 11, Saudi Arabia's shameful human rights record drew little international criticism.

Women live with much of the discrimination for which the Taliban was condemned in Afghanistan. The media are controlled and editors are bumped for not toeing the line.

Adults and children are flogged in public; domestic violence is rife, and prisoners are tortured. Wander into "chop chop" square, next to Riyadh's central mosque, on a Friday and you might come face to face with a swordsman beheading a murderer or taking a limb from a robber.

All of these stresses and strains are feeding into a power struggle in the royal family as the ailing King Fahd edges closer to the grave. And the risk for Saudis is that even greater power could be ceded to the radical conservatives at the mosques.

History is a discouraging guide. After crises like the Iranian revolution, the Gulf War, the Camp David breakdown and the invasion of Afghanistan, Saudis have retreated into the folds of Islam. A Western observer in Riyadh told the Herald: "Now they have September 11 and history says we'll have a new tug-of-war between modernity and backwardness."

PEOPLE here don't go around blessing the September 11 deaths but a Gallup poll earlier this year found that only 16 per cent of Saudis had a favourable opinion of the US. So tap into any level of society and if you don't find at least a hint of admiration for the man described by a Riyadh diplomat as the "Che Guevara of the Arab world", you'll find endorsement for his cause, not withstanding his ultimate goal - destruction of the House of Saud.

Dr Tawfeeq Al-Sediry, the deputy minister for Islamic affairs, told the Herald: "Some people admire bin Laden, but it's not about liking him; it's about hating the US."

The reformist academic Abdulaziz Alsebail came from a different angle: "Some people see him as a hero, but to others he's an infidel like the Kharijayt, people who the Prophet warned would live piously amongst us, but who would work against us. But because the bin Laden attacks were in the US, some Saudis were relieved - not because they support bin Laden, but because of their rage against the US over what is happening to the Palestinians."

A bureaucrat who seemed genuinely puzzled by the US security response after the attacks, said: "After all, 9/11 was just one incident. The Palestinians get it every day."

In Jeddah, where the air is a cocktail of the smells of the desert and of the Red Sea, there are mixed reports on how the bin Laden construction conglomerate has fared since September 11 - it is doing well at home but meeting some foreign resistance, according to one business observer.

The family hunkers behind a wall of "no comment", a strategy recommended by its US media consultants. Even the Crown Prince was unable to breach it. An Information Ministry official complained to the Herald: "I had a direct order from Prince Abdullah for them to talk to the media, but the family refused. But they are a great family, and just because there is one terrorist, it doesn't mean the whole family's bad."

Bin Laden and most of the hijackers came from the far west of the country, from towns and villages along Highway 15. Built by a bin Laden company, the road pushes south from Jeddah before twisting up into the mountains of Asir.

The Herald's attempts to explore the roots of terrorism in this south-west corner of the kingdom were hampered by Information Ministry officials who wanted to show off the area's heritage architecture and hand out books on local jewellery and costumes as they blocked any contact with families of the mass murderers or local academics and mullahs.

Five of the hijackers came from Asir's dusty twin towns, Abha and Khamis Mushayt. Before they disappeared in the months before September 11, they frequented two mosques in Khamis Mushayt, one of which was built by the father of the hijacker brothers Wael and Walid Alshehri.

Khamis Mushayt, a nondescript hotch-potch of boxy buildings, was also home to the Saudi air base from which American fighter jets took off for bombing runs on Baghdad in 1990-91 .

Despite the blocking by the Information Ministry, the Herald managed to interview Dr Ali Al Mosa, a local reformist academic, who debunked some of the theories offered as explanations for the young men of Asir signing on for death, theories like poverty and isolation.

He said: "Most of them were from very rich, top-class Saudi families. The father of the Alshehri boys is one of the richest people in the area and the other families are not far behind him."

Al Mosa blamed the success of al- Qaeda's recruitment drive in Asir on the spread of Wahabism, the rigid Islamic creed by which most Saudis are obliged to live.

The us-and-them element of Al Mosa's explanation dove-tailed with that attributed weeks earlier to a senior military officer, who insisted that little should be read into the hijackers' Saudi origins, because they had come from beyond Najd, the heartland of the Saudi monarchy, and therefore were not of the "fabric" of the kingdom. Put together, the two seemed to suggest that Asir was something of a fringe province.

This deeply tribal corner of Saudi Arabia, with a chip on its shoulder, is racked by suspicion of outsiders and distrust of the central government.

And as in the rest of the country there are none of the usual outlets for youthful exuberance - no discos, no nightclubs, no cinemas, no girls. But one of the few outlets there would have been in the recent past would have created its own lore - US-funded flights to jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Asir was close to the bin Laden family roots, just over the border in Yemen. It was here that the boat used in the 1998 terror attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour was bought, and investigators have concluded that this was the bolt hole to which those who mounted the attack escaped.

Asir held just about every plank of the bin Laden platform.

Now, omerta, Middle East-style, has kicked in. There was much clucking in the community about the need to look after the families of the hijackers and the Information Ministry official explained: "They complained to the Government, so now we protect them from the media. It is a crisis for them; it is an embarrassment to have sons like that."

Weary of retelling the hijackers' story, a local journalist said: "It's the classic line - boys raised in good families turned to religion at 18; at 21 they disappeared to join the jihad in Chechnya or Afghanistan; they called home on the last religious festival to give their parents traditional greetings."

Investigators have concluded that the young men were unlikely to have been signed up in Asir for the September 11 mission. Instead, they are thought to have been urged by radical mullahs to volunteer to fight in Afghanistan and Chechnya, a thought that finds support in bin Laden's videotape boast that none of the hijackers knew what was to happen on September 11.

Some of the hijackers' parents still refuse to accept that their sons were involved in the attacks. But Al Mosa told of a recent two-hour meeting he had with the father of one of the hijackers: "He told me that for the first six months he wasn't able to believe it, but then he started to ask himself where was his son - why no calls? Why did he not come home at this terrible time?

"So he started to look at things again, and now he accepts that his son did do this thing. When I saw him he was crying and I'm sure he condemns it 100 per cent. He was not a happy man. All the families were in denial, but then they started to talk about their sons' pasts. They said that they were relatively innocent and that they must have been brainwashed. Their sons were victims too."

In the wake of September 11, many Saudis are infuriated by Western critics who blame the dead hand of Islam in Saudi education for leaving so many young Saudis capable of being exploited by bin Laden. Riyadh businessman Abdulrahman Al-Zamil exploded: "We all are graduates of our schools and just because there are 100 problem kids, they say our education system is bad?"

Prince Faisal bin Salman, an academic and member of the royal family, set for himself the task of reading about 20,000 pages of school texts, before declaring that he had found only one line that might be anti-Jewish in a junior text and only 10 or 11 pages that might be described as hostile to non-Muslims in senior school texts.

But in Abha, Al Mosa claimed they were were missing the point. His worry was about what the students were not taught. And schools were in such a religious arm-lock that what was taught was austere and of little use in a practical world.

He said: "The whole system has been corrupted - unless you are religious you will not get a place in university. They treat students like they are in primary school and they teach them none of the right things."

In the middle of all of this you find the likes of Jamal Khashoggi, a senior editor at the daily Arab News. Desperate for the oxygen of greater freedom, he says: "Maybe we need a glasnost, so that ideas for change can float in open, healthy discussion.

"But I don't see that happening. There is no initiative; things are taken for granted. We have no experience of democracy - we still debate what modernisation is and we still fear globalisation. The biggest obstacle is the religious establishment, a monster that we have allowed to grow.

"No-one is asking the question 'why?' Why did hundreds of our sons go to fight in Afghanistan when they knew it was a civil war, with Muslims killing Muslims? The reason is because these questions go to the role of the religious establishment and its narrow, rigid understanding of Islam. We are confused - we say that September 11 should not have happened, but at the same time, we say that the US got what it deserved."

Khashoggi dreams of democracy and he believes in the US notion of a country such as a liberated Iraq becoming an example in the region. But he seemed to be hosing himself down as he concluded: "My friends say I'm too wishful, too optimistic. Here people don't trust any wind that blows from the US. I don't blame them, because that's the wind that comes from Israel."

Diplomats here are intrigued. Saudi Arabia has been unified only twice in the last 1500 years. Said one of them: "What you see now is the most stable it's ever been." Another added: "The Saudis are stunned, but they can't sit here complaining about the Zionist conspiracy and leaving all the decisions to the diabetic gerontocracy of the House of Saud."

It seems that is what many will do. Some can even laugh about it.

As the Herald waited for an appointment with a senior intelligence official, one of his colleagues chatted about the changing Riyadh skyline, on which the royal princes seek to outdo each other with the latest and sharpest architectural designs.

This man spoke in praise of the polished aluminium sheath of the Kingdom Tower, a high-rise that looks as though it might have come from the Alessi design house. It's a slender, oval-shaped cylinder that high up separates into two lean shoulders across which sits what might be described as a handle. The effect is a great, stunning hole in the building which is floodlit at night.

"Do you like hole?" he asked. "It's for the planes to go through."

Manhattan to Baghdadby Paul McGeough will be published by Allen & Unwin early next year.